Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Well, the Winter Classic was great. I was lucky enough to be there for it (and the Legends Classic the next day! Way to go Jay Miller! Nice Hattie!) I could write about either classic, and how the atmosphere of Fenway was a magical thing, and how it was fun chanting LET'S GO BRUINS at the flyers fans, who were out in force and chanting LET'S GO FLYERS right back. It was pretty magical for the coffers as well, pulling a disappearing act on a lot of people's money. Worth it.

This has been bugging me in reading post-classic stuff, so here's my take:Sweet Caroline is a Fenway tradition, very similar to last year's "Take me out to the hockey game" and Dennis Leary and Lenny Clarke are staples of the "people from Boston who are sorta famous and like sports" list.

Mark "Fire Hydrant" Recchi tied the game and Sturm finished it, on a pass from Bergeron. Way to go, guys!

On to the rest of the last ten games:

TUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUKK

Lookin' good, Mr. Finn. Thomas has been getting the majority of the starts, and has been playing very well in them (except when he, ahem, plays the body) and all of that. Let's look at some stats, though they are through game 41. I've been very busy the last couple of weeks, without much time for blogging. Mostly it's been good to excellent stuff, though, so I'm okay with it.

87.76%

That's the PK, humming along at peak performance (literally, #1 in the league) though they are in the bottom half for short-handed goals. Surprise, surprise! The Bruins aren't that great at scoring.

17.48%

That's the powerplay, all the way up to 18th in the league right now. If Bergeron's hand is broken, I expect this to drop as he plays the point on the PP pretty well. Who knows, though, with this team. In 1748, the ruins of Pompeii were discovered, and mathematician Bernoulli died. Bernoulli contributed to The Calculus and taught Euler, who invented mathematical notation. Without these gents, we might not have things like powerplay percentage or CORSI numbers. Where would the sports nerds go?

Where was I? Oh yes, the Bruins, not math from the 1700s.

5

The place the Bruins are in in the East by points, points percentage, or Simple Rating System. That's 5 more points than they had in 07-08, and 13 fewer than last year. It's also the number of Olympic rings, and if Bergeron's injury is bad will be the amount of Bruins going to the games (Krejci, Chara, Satan, Thomas, Sturm). Please be okay, Bergeron.

If you use the Pythagorean expectation for winning percentage (which I hear is big with Baseball), then the Bruins come in at 10th on that list, 3 spots higher than in the league standings.

I've been playing with a spreadsheet and this Pythagorean thing and Pythagorean points, and I'm still not sure if it's anything useful. If I come up with something or there's a stat-head out there that wants to give me a quick intro on some of this stuff, I'm happy to hear all about it.

Regardless of what the numbers say, we all know where our hearts are. Happy New Year, everyone.